Photon Optics for Future Light Sources

The beams of fourth-generation light sources will raise new
challenges for the optical elements needed for the optimization of phase space
parameters according to the experimental requirements. The objectives of this
Working Group are:

to pinpoint the relevant problems,

to evaluate them,

to propose strategies to solve them.

Working Group Activities:

The main optical elements are crystals, mirrors, gratings, multilayers
and
combinations of them, e.g., multilayer gratings, Bragg-Fresnel optics. All these
devices have fundamental and technological performance limits in terms of their
quality without and with heat load. These must be discussed in the light of the
future extremely bright laser beams, both in the soft and in the hard X-ray
regime.

The following topics are proposed for discussion by the Working Group members:

We will get input from experts in the field of synchrotron X-ray
optics who know the optics performance under the brightest presently available
conditions and from other experts in the laser area who have experience with
ultra-bright and ultra-short photon pulses. We will try to extrapolate from the
existing knowledge to predict the performance of the optics for soft and hard
X-ray FELs.

We will attempt to come up with an outline of R&D strategies to meet the future
photon optics needs for FEL-based experiments.